[TxMt] Re: A couple of thoughts from a TextMate newbie

[Kevin Reid]

On Apr 30, 2009, at 6:50, Darren Brierton wrote:

> Firstly, I was on the whole a very happy user of Emacs, and an article
> I wrote describing my Emacs environment for XHTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP
> web development was even mentioned in the O'Reilly Emacs book. I'd
> tried TextMate a couple of years ago and not liked it, but I tried it
> again a few weeks ago and was blown away.
>
> However there are two things that I miss. ...

Some comments from my own understanding of TM. Sorry if I'm saying  
things which have already been discussed; I don't follow the list very  
closely.

> 1. Good parenthesis matching and highlighting
>
> I'm actually genuinely surprised at this. TexMate is very weak in this
> area. I should be able to put the cursor between say "})" and have the
> two closing parentheses highlighted in different colours and have
> their corresponding opening parenthese highlighted in matching  
> colours.

TM's grammar facility allows very good matching, and it also has a  
default brace-matching facility -- what it lacks is UI which  
automatically *presents* this information. What it does have is Edit >  
Select > Enclosing Brackets | Current Scope.

> 2. The ability to parse DTDs and Schemas for automagic knowledge of
> markup languages

Pondering this, it seems to me that the most powerful way to do this  
would be to add a hook to allow bundles to compute the definition (as  
plist text) of an additional language grammar to be used with the  
current file (which could then be referenced by the static grammar  
provided by the bundle).

-- 
Kevin Reid                            <http://homepage.mac.com/kpreid/>